1981-1990

Before he went on to create Totoro and Studio Ghibli, Miyazaki captured a whole generation of children’s imaginations with his retelling of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries using a loveable cast of canines. Sherlock Hound, released as either Famous Detective Holmes or Detective Holmes in Japan, is an anime based on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes series where all the characters are depicted as anthropomorphic animals, the majority dogs, though Holmes is a fox and his enemy Professor Moriarty is a wolf. The show featured regular appearances of Jules Verne-steampunk style technology, adding a 19th-century science-fiction atmosphere to the series.Read More »

Scope is a prisoner on a behemoth space station and is chosen, like all his fellow prisoners, to ‘volunteer’ for the exploration of far-away planets. Landing on planet Australia 458, he is given a hero’s welcome with all the sex, booze, and violence that any one man can stomach. But as his new caretakers push him towards even more heinous and deplorable acts, Scope finds that his freedom comes with a high price; his own violent demise, broadcast live for the viewing pleasure of Australia 458’s inhabitants. Is there a way out? Or is Scope’s fate sealed?Read More »

The world has been ravaged by nuclear war. The planet is frozen and radiation kills anyone or anything that ventures outside of ‘The Dome’. Soft is a shepherd for the last remnants of humanity who have gathered together as they await rescue from a mysterious craft known only as ‘The Ark.’ He wanders among the masses, performing his regular daily tasks; keeping morale from plummeting, wooing prostitutes, squashing rebellions, and sometimes feeding the hungry. But as the true and sinister nature of ‘The Dome’ comes to light, Soft must ask himself if humanity is worth saving?Read More »

Peter Berdon joins a group of Stalinists after his father is killed by the Nazis in this grim political drama. The film begins with his arrest and uses flashbacks to tell the events that led to his incarceration. His abuse is chronicled both in and out of prison after he falls in with a Bonnie and Clyde-like duo after the war is over.

The first film for which Laibach composed a soundtrackRead More »

Quote:
The Unbearable Lightness of Being is a profoundly beguiling movie about sex, love, and rebellion. Its lead characters caper through Prague Spring, Czechoslovakia’s 1968 version of the Summer of Love, and then try to withstand the effects of Soviet occupation. They achieve an offhand grandeur. As they drop verbal bombshells about the murderous duplicity of politics and the uglification of the universe, they never lose their ardor or originality. All they want to rule them is passion.Read More »

Quote:
“Stonebridge Park was visually inspired by a railway bridge in an outer London suburb. Images from a hand-held camera are accompanied by a voice-over commentary presenting the thoughts of a petty criminal panicked by the consequences of robbing his former employer.” Geoff Brown and Bryony Dixon, www.screenonline.org.uk “In these films, fictional voice-over narration is added to documentary footage of landscape and townscape. The narratives were written after the pictures were shot and edited.” – P.K. “…seeking flowers of evil, not on the rain-spattered pavements of Montparnasse, but somewhere along the Harrow Road.” – Sheila Johnston, Time Out. “…a riveting combination of formal-concrete cinema and glassy eyed schizo realism.” – Raymond Durgnat.Read More »

Art imitating art is the basis of this demonic tale of a group of invited guests to the screening of a horror film that brings naturalism to life. They are baited and penned, and their walled-in feeling quickly turns to screaming fear as those who are dead lust after the flesh of the living. In this full-scale cinema of hell, it’s only a question of time before demons from the abyss are asking for second portions.Read More »

Jonas Mekas – filmmaker, film critic, archivist, poet, lecturer and curator – is one of the leading figures of American avant-garde film and video. Born in Lithuania, he immigrated to New York in 1949 after spending time in Nazi forced labor camps and displaced persons camps. In addition to his many narrative and diary films that have screened extensively at festivals and museums around the world, he has worked as editor-in-chief of Film Culture, movie critic for the Village Voice and co-founder of Anthology Film Archives, one of the world’s largest and most important repositories of avant-garde films.Read More »

“Seuls is a film about the symbolic order of love, a sort of fantastic thriller on Oedipus…” ~Francis Reusser

Synopsis:
Jean (Niels Arestrup), the lead character in this psychological journey is torn by a search for his lost childhood, the overwhelming need to love a woman of his dreams (someone he has invented), and a struggle with his latent bisexuality. Jean finds some photos inside an automatic photo station that look like his mother who died soon after he was born. He starts to fantasize about the woman, giving her a name and identity and waiting for her to appear. During this time, he meets Carole (Christine Boisson) and has an affair with her, all the while pretending he has this other relationship with the woman in the photo. Significantly, the couple who introduce him to Carole is childless, and they eventually split up – perhaps a comment on the importance of childhood to the adult world. In the end, Carole discovers that Jean’s “other woman” has no real existence, causing a crisis that finds a symbolic expression as the last scenes close on the story.Read More »